Daytime drinking

If Lee Chang-dong's films are rough for you, then Daytime Drinking could be an even greater challenge to the viewers. If Lee's films are about the political, social and human conditions that drive its protagonists to a final end, then Daytime Drinking points to another direction: that of the empty life of a young drifter.

Following an alcohol-filled heated debates among four close friends whose setting resembles those of the French cinema, a young man finds himself the only fool to keep that promise by turning up in a supposedly holiday resort in the middle of the dreary, close-down season. The film then follows him when he awaits, in vain, for the arrival of his friend in a shoebox bare room in virtual isolation. The gaps between non-events are so long and the incidents seem so insignificant, that the viewer is rendered the only companion of the acne face drifter until he wakes up alone and shivering in his underpants by the snow-covered roadside. With its loose plots, wintry landscape, unglamorous protagonist and raw cinematograph, one would be excused for mistaking it as a remark of Jia Zhangke's directory debut Xiaoshan Going Home in which the camera follows the immigrant worker's fruitless efforts to find a ticket home, and to a certain degree, it was that comparison that had kept me staying tuned as if to see how it will differ from its 'predecessor'.

While Xiaoshan's hunt for a ticket home ends in vain, the drifter in Daytime Drinking is captured by the dilemma if he should follow another female stranger to a seashore town he has just left, at the risk of repeating the humiliating experience, or, get on a homebound bus. It is then we realise, once and for all, that the series of incidents that lead to his being stripped bare in deep winter is all of his own making; there is a sheer lack of will in the life of this aimless young man.

An insightful character portrait, the film also offers an interesting glimpse on the Korean drinking culture among the young people.